War diaries are often written under duress, and are attempts at documenting events as they unfold, or narrating stories of how people survive under trying circumstances. She argues that conditions of war under which authors produce their work dictate the form itself. When an author’s life is under threat, when safety is compromised, m…[Read more]

In Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte (2005) and in Mahmoud Darwish’s epic poem Mural (2000), the authors contemplate the nothingness that accompanies death, a concern that increasingly permeates their later writings. Although ‘death’ is depicted differently, the authors fear that with death “the universe wo…[Read more]

This memorial tribute for the late Ciaran Carson (1948-2019), Irish creative writer extraordinaire, was commissioned three years ago for inclusion in a special number of “Reading Ireland” which has not yet materialised. It is now archived in and by Humanities Common on the third anniversary of his funeral rites and burial in Belfast, Northern…[Read more]

This memorial tribute for the late Ciaran Carson (1948-2019), Irish creative writer extraordinaire, was commissioned three years ago for inclusion in a special number of “Reading Ireland” which has not yet materialised. It is now archived in and by Humanities Common on the third anniversary of his funeral rites and burial in Belfast, Northern…[Read more]

Contrary to the “populist linguistic purism” of Remy de Gourmont, who believed in a “native” and primal language, as well as in a literature that “does not receive neither borrow anything” (Roussin), Proust moulds his novel in a “gloriously impure, lumberfilled” linguistic matter (Malcolm Bowie). Proust’s idea of language is radically opposed…[Read more]

In this essay we reinterpret Camus’s novel The Plague in light of the urgency of history, that with Covid 19 pandemia made us face a real pestilence, thus allowing us to read reality and fiction as even. Our rereading relativizes the traditional allegoric interpretation of critics, while at the same time it widens its perspectives. It is in fact i…[Read more]

Thisarticleaims at a better comprehension of the series of lectures that Joseph Czapski gave in the Soviet camp of Grazovietzbetween 1940 and 1941. The case of Czapski is well known, but his exceptional performance (of memory, and critical inquiry) deserves further investigation. Not surprisingly, the Polish painter…[Read more]

During the second half of the 20th century, Jordi Sarsanedas was a relevant actor in the bilateral relationship between Catalonia and France. His engagement as a cultural activist led him to occupy strategic positions to disseminate the Catalan language and literature. Suffice to say that he was Serra d’Or editor-in-chief, dean of the I…[Read more]

This essay/ article examines the provenance and the implications of a literary archive acquired by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of Queen’s University Belfast and now fully catalogued by Brian Caraher and Emma Hegarty under the auspices of the British Academy. The state-of-the-art. fully annotated, online catalogue establishes the…[Read more]

This essay/ article examines the provenance and the implications of a literary archive acquired by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of Queen’s University Belfast and now fully catalogued by Brian Caraher and Emma Hegarty under the auspices of the British Academy. The state-of-the-art. fully annotated, online catalogue establishes the…[Read more]

This essay explores Dante Alighieri’s notion of projectile motion in relation to spiritual fulfillment in the first canto of Paradiso. The notion of impetus, or projectile motion, stood at the confluence of Greek philosophical rationality (mediated by a substantial Arabic corpus) and Christian thought, and it provides a unique window through…[Read more]